Schoolgirls’ Abduction Roils Japan

Three sixth-grade girls were discovered locked up in a Tokyo condominium Thursday along with a corpse after a fourth classmate escaped and called for help in the latest high-profile crime involving children to rock Japan.

When police arrived at the apartment just a few blocks from the prime minister’s residence, they found the girls handcuffed in different bedrooms and the body of one of the suspected abductors in the living room, an apparent suicide. The children were reported missing Sunday by their parents.

Thursday’s discovery came on the heels of two other major crimes involving children this month. In Nagasaki, a 4-year-old boy was abducted, stripped and killed by a 12-year-old boy, who threw the kindergartner off a seven-story parking garage. And in Okinawa, three junior high students beat a classmate to death, leaving the body in a graveyard. “We didn’t like the way he was acting,” one of the boys reportedly told police.

But unlike the two earlier cases, experts say, the latest one has sexual overtones and threatens to shine a spotlight at least briefly on an ugly side of Japan: the nation’s relative tolerance of child prostitution and sexual exploitation.

“I’m really shocked to hear about this news,” said Mariko Mitsui, director of the Osaka-based Gender Equality Center, a civic group. “Educators, parents, police, the ministries are all turning a blind eye to the problem.”

On Thursday afternoon, a crowd of reporters and onlookers stood outside the International Plaza condominiums as police photographed, inspected and dusted the premises for evidence. At one point, authorities escorted the victims out of the building beneath a large blue tarp, obscuring their identities, before ushering them into an ambulance and taking them to a hospital to be treated.

According to local media reports, the four students of Inagi City Elementary School just outside Tokyo ventured into the capital last Sunday, apparently lured by the prospect of easy money, after telling their parents they were going to a local supermarket.

The four were reportedly met by Kotaro Yoshisato, 29, and an accomplice who took them by taxi to the posh 11th-floor condominium, where they were handcuffed and hooded. A leaflet later found in one of the girl’s homes hinted at how they had been lured in: “Petite Angel, Part Time Job,” it read, along with the suspect’s phone number.

On Thursday, one of the girls escaped and pleaded for help at a nearby flower shop. “Someone might be chasing after me,” she said, according to a flower shop employee interviewed on Nippon Television Network. “My friends are in there and they need help.”

The employee called police, who freed the girls. Yoshisato was found slumped on the floor with his head and body wrapped in plastic, which investigators believe he used to asphyxiate himself together with carbon monoxide emitted by a portable stove .

Despite a broad perception that crimes committed by juveniles are on the increase here, police statistics show that serious crimes involving Japanese ages 6 to 19 fell 30% over the last decade, although there has been an uptick in the number of reported juvenile victims.

What has changed markedly is the media attention these cases attract and the declining ages of those involved, particularly in the sex trades, said Manabu Sato, a professor of education at Tokyo University.

Japan was once known as a safe haven for perpetrators of sex crimes against children. In recent years, authorities have taken a harder line -- cracking down on child Internet pornography and changing the age of consent to 18 from 14 in 1999. Critics say cultural practices lag far behind legal changes, however, and they cite judges, police and other officials periodically caught soliciting sex from schoolgirls. Many of the men are let go with a warning and a suspended sentence.

Liaisons are often arranged through Internet dating clubs and text messaging networks. This has made the problem of child prostitution less obvious, critics say, but no less prevalent.

Mamoru Fukutomi, a sociologist with Tokyo Gakugei University who patrols Tokyo’s Kabukicho nightclub district counseling teenagers, said he recently called the parents of one young runaway who had been gone for days to come pick her up. Not only had the parents not bothered to file a police report, Fukutomi said, but they didn’t even seem to care that their daughter was gone as long as she was reachable on her mobile phone.

“Mobile phones and Internet dating sites are much more prevalent, child prostitutes are getting younger and more parents have checked out,” he said.

Hisako Ueno of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.